Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

Actually, there’s only been one skunk so far. And it wasn’t in the middle of the road. In fact, I didn’t see it. I just smelled it.

It’s mostly raccoons I see splattered on the road or lying, slowly bloating, by the side of it. A few opossums, too, I think–hard to tell when they’re smooshed, but that’s what they look like they are. Or, rather, were. The occasional cat. It’s like an Animal Kingdom war zone out there.

I have been keeping tabs on one particular(ly) dead raccoon that lies on Kimball Road, just north of the turn into Wallaceburg… I noticed it as soon as it appeared, and then charted its progressive bloat each day as I drove past. My copy of Mary Roach’s Stiff (easily the funniest, most fabulous & interesting book I’ve read in years!)
is packed away with the rest of my books in the storage unit I rented, so I couldn’t look to it to find out if I should be expecting the corpse to finally explode in a gassy plume of rotten guts or if it would just eventually quietly collapse. But it kept getting more and more like a furry balloon, and every time I drove by I winced, hoping that the damned thing wouldn’t choose that particular moment to kerpow and splatter the parents’ car with a maggoty soup of ex-raccoon organs.

But it never did. When I caught my morning glimpse of it a few days ago, it had collapsed in on itself. Didn’t see any evidence of it having exploded first, so it looks like it just imploded. Must confess I was a little disappointed… It was so anticlimactic. *sigh*

Further north on Kimball, there is something on the shoulder of the road that has interested me even more. It’s a box.

Did you see the movie Se7en? Remember the end of it? That box that was delivered by John Doe to the rendezvous spot where he led Detectives Mills and Somerset…? If so, then you know what I think is in that box at the side of Kimball Road…

Dude. It’s a head. It hasta be! I know it! How do I know? Because the box has been squashed at one end and there is blood spray out the other end, all over the gravel. At least, it looks like blood. And no, I’m certainly not gonna stop and check because, bleah, I don’t wanna see a severed, squashed human head up close, thank you very much. (Well… okay, I kinda do.)

I wonder… Could the (obviously unmedicated) masked man pictured above be exacting revenge on behalf of his little furry friends that we are so heedlessly squooshing whenever they creep out onto the pavement we rule? [shivers]

Then again, I guess it could just be a Box O’ Wine, run over like some poor little critter on the road.

Oh. Speaking of X, here’s the Music that soured milk in Southwestern Ontario over the past week or so…

Sugar - File Under: Easy Listening

Big Star - In Space

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

Frank Black and the Catholics - pistolero

The Replacements - Pleased To Meet Me

X - Live at the Whisky A Go-Go On the Fabulous Sunset Strip

New Order - Low-life

Beck - Odelay

Sloan - Navy Blues

Eric Clapton - Unplugged

R.E.M. - Green

Neil Young - Sleeps With Angels

Replacements - Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash

and a set by treble charger: maybe it’s me, wide awake bored, self-title

(Yes, the car’s cd player is working again. Dad fixed it himself. He inserted Mom’s copy of the Beaches soundtrack and it proved to be a perfect dose of ipecac: it made the cd player throw up the four other disks that were stuck inside. Y’know, I think that soundtrack would work the same way on me.)